For the average person, YouTube is an enjoyable social platform where one can discover new artists, funny videos, and the cutest puppy moment. For some, however, YouTube is also a place full of opportunity, an area with an incomprehensible amount of audience reach. If you think like the latter, we admire and relate to your perspective, for you’re a marketer.
While marketers understand that YouTube is a frontier full of possibilities for their brand, many also fear it, and we’re here to help you tackle that fear. Both an organic and a paid YouTube presence are highly integral strategies for a marketer to adopt while aiming for overall brand growth.
YouTube is the 2nd largest search network, falling short only of its parent company, Google. Therefore, being the 2nd largest search network, this also means YouTube is accessed an extensive amount of times per day. You can only guess how important it is then for your brand to have some sort of presence on YouTube. Whether you solely have a channel where you upload videos highlighting your brand’s products, services, or aesthetic, or you also back up this organic presence with paid advertising efforts, YouTube has become an important part of a company’s marketing strategy.
For paid efforts, YouTube can either play a role in a more acquisition- and sales-driven way, or it can have a huge impact as an awareness driver for new customers. The two main YouTube tactics that you can leverage within your paid search advertising efforts are: YouTube remarketing and YouTube prospecting. These paid YouTube efforts leverage your organic YouTube content (either unlisted or public) housed in your channel to continue nurturing and growing your audience.
1) YouTube Remarketing:
This paid effort on YouTube is a great friend to any brand who a) has a presence on YouTube, b) drives traffic to the site, and c) has a more restricted marketing and advertising budget. While YouTube Remarketing can be used by most brands, big or small, it is a more affordable way to continue to nurture your audience on YouTube. As a little refresher, remarketing is a type of paid search campaign that allows you to re-reach (or retarget or remarket) people who have visited and engaged with your website in any way with branded ads. With YouTube Remarketing, you can not only retarget people who have visited and engaged with your website, but you can also retarget people who have watched your YouTube videos or followed your YouTube channel. It’s a great way to more affordably nurture brand awareness on YouTube, keep the competitors at bay, and push sales.
2) YouTube Prospecting:
Are you interested in growing your targeted audience? Do you have an organic YouTube channel that can be leveraged? Then YouTube prospecting is a paid YouTube effort you should consider. All YouTube Prospecting means is that your paid search team can take your beautiful YouTube videos hosted on your YouTube channel (again, either public or unlisted) and use them in advertising efforts to reach new people. As paid search experts, we’d work with you to deduce the most relevant topics, interests, videos, channels, and keywords that apply to your audience base. From there, we can target people who are relevant to your brand and relevant to the audience you want to grow. We can also use various demographic data – like age – to continue to segment targeting. The sky’s the limit (well, almost)! The goal here is to increase your brand reach and grow your audience base. From there, the new people you reach in this YouTube Prospecting campaign can be funneled into your remarketing efforts for continued nurturing!
While YouTube as a platform may seem like a brave new world, it is definitely one that should be taken by storm. Efforts on YouTube can help both your additional paid search campaigns (such as search, remarketing, and shopping) as well as your social media efforts. As you know, marketing is a full-funnel approach, and everything interacts with each other.
Having a strong presence on YouTube – the 2nd largest search network – and nurturing that presence is highly integral to overall brand growth in this ever-expanding environment.